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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Evaporated milk ice cream

A few weeks back, I made coconut milk ice cream for our Friday night dessert. I don't have an ice cream machine, and it was labor intensive. Lots of timers being set, scraping sides and re chilling until set. And well....it was really icy and more of a sorbet texture than ice cream. Plus, I could still taste the coconut, and I am NOT a coconut fan.

Meh.

My friend Barb also has a recipe for non-icecream machine ice cream, but she was out of town and I didn't want to hassle her for her recipe but I knew it required whipping cream and sweetened condensed milk. I pulled up pinterest and searched for SCM ice cream and found this recipe at Cookies & Cups. I checked my pantry and had both ingredients. Heavy whipping cream and sweetened condensed milk.

Or so I thought.

I whipped my cream in the chilled bowl and opened the can of sweetened condensed milk. Something didn't look right. It must be old. I checked the expiry date. 7/2015. Still good. Hmmm. It's runnier than I remember SCM being.

And then I re-read my label.

Fuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh-k.

Evaporated Milk.

Boo!

I'm not exactly a good recipe follower anyways. I usually try shortcuts and substitutes that fail more times than not, so today was no different.

I scrambled and searched google for the difference between evaporated and sweetened condensed. Both are made by heating milk until liquid evaporates, however, SCM has sugar added during the process. One CAN make their own SCM if they so desire by heating the evaporated milk and adding 3/4c sugar to every 5oz of evaporated milk. Once dissolved, turn off heat and let cool. Voila! SCM.

But, Ehhh- that's too much work.

I dumped the evaporated milk into my stiff peaked whipping cream, tossed in 1/4c sugar and crossed my fingers that it would still work. Once mixed, I divided into 1/2 cup portions using baby food containers and Popsicle moulds. NZ requested berry icecream, so I puréed blueberries and threw in some whole berries as well. Other flavors made: peanut butter hot chocolate & vanilla with sprinkles. I just added the mixings and stirred them into the individual cups.

I put the Popsicles and cups in the freezer for an hour and a half until lunchtime. After lunch (and the kids were in bed), I treated myself to the vanilla sprinkles cup....

Guess what?

It totally worked.

I'm actually glad I didn't have SCM on hand, because this one is the perfect marriage of "not too sweet" and creamy.